VIOLET EYES by Nicole Luiken

Author:Nicole Luiken
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2001-03-03T16:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 12

“BINGO,” CARL SAID SOFTLY, twenty minutes later. “The feed is going to the local TV channel.” Another five minutes of typing, then a small frown. “I can’t trace it any farther.

“Then well start there,” I said.

“Coming up.”

Wendy and I crowded around him. A slightly digitized image appeared of a man in a lab coat slurping coffee. He didn’t look as if he was working very hard, but then, how hard could it be to play tapes of old newscasts and Threes Company reruns every hour or so?

“Can he see us?” I asked.

“No. I covered up the camera when I first came up here.” Carl frowned. “I’m not even sure he knows we’re here. The transmission is piggybacked on the TV feed, but it’s not going to the TV station. It’s going somewhere else.”

“It’ll have to do. Good work.” Wendy and I prepared a few props, then gave Carl the nod.

“Going to picture and sound.” Carl clicked some buttons.

“Hey, meathead,” I said.

The tech slopped his coffee, staring around in all directions. He must have been facing a wall of TVs too.

“Yeah, you with the coffee.” He looked up, and I waved at him. I didn’t give him a chance to speak. “Do you know what this is?” I stepped back and let him see one of the Apple II computers. It was plugged in, and the cursor was blinking placidly.

“Do you know how much this is worth?”

He shook his head.

“Tell him, Wendy.”

“It’s one of only twenty working models in the world. The last one that went to auction sold for nine million dollars, and that was four years ago.”

The figure awoke a gleam of greed in his eye.

I took one of the baseball bats we’d snitched from the gym and hit a home run on the monitor.

“What are you doing?” he shrieked.

I hit it again. The plastic casing around the central processing unit proved to be rather tough, so I opened it up and broke all the delicate circuitry boards.

His mouth was hanging open when I finished.

Maryanne and a few others looked shocked, too. They hadn’t really believed I would do it.

But I would have done anything to get Mike back.

“Now there are only nineteen working models, and I have all of them.”

The technician was still gaping. I could see his tonsils.

“I want to talk to the boss,” I said. “Not your supervisor or even his boss. I want to talk to the head honcho, the king of the hill, the man in charge, and I want to talk to him now. I will break another computer every fifteen minutes and another antique every ten minutes. Better hurry.”

At my signal, Carl cut the picture on our end. The tech could no longer see us, and he forgot we could see him. He scrambled to find a phone. He used a videophone, but I refused to let myself be distracted. I set my watch and made Jimmy the official timekeeper.

I had to smash a typewriter before the tech got hold of his supervisor, and it took two more computers and a sewing machine to convince her we were serious.

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